aØvertisement ON THE TOWN Be the first to hear about events, promotions, and special offers from New Yorker advertisers" SUN, SAND, SCREENWRITERS. .',. ,,6 is proud, to sponsor the 9th Annual Nantucket Film Festival June 16-20 Join us for: Four-Wheel-Drive Beach Tours Beach Yoga Surf Clinics , ,. Beach Screenings and much, much more. ''''-. _" .- ,_j'" .,'OJ I ,. . ' 1 FOR INFORMATION OR TO GET TICKETS, CALL " 508-325-6274 or log on to www.newyorker.com and click on The New Yorker Reader link. ,'!.Ji( " . Jeep is a registered trade - of Daim! rChrysler Corporation. . r . o^ i <;* ", , P", _ l; ,". -, I' f ..' '. . ^ "' .....>1 '\. . , . *- \.>'J ./ , ;,:,;, ,> ' '';). . . 1 / . . ' .. .'t. ... " 'l c' .", ''!'" , i: For complete festival program guide visit: nantucketfilmfestivatorg gious Betty Parsons-and she lived and worked downtown, by the East River, on Coenties Slip. She shared the neigh- borhood with Robert Rauschenberg, Ellsworth Kelly, James RosenqUIst, and several other fomenters of tough- minded responses to the triumphs of Abstract Expressionism. All sought sturdy formats for painting that would I face up to the masters while eschew- ing the he-man egomania that marred much of the "second generation" New York School. Heroic posturing embar- rassed an American avant-garde that was conscious of inheriting global art- world leadership. Martin's earliest paint- ings at Dia:Beacon evince a poignant struggle to find a satisfactory style. They aren't very good, apart from displaying a strikingly talented way with filmy tex- ture and muted color. Then comes the grid. It is square or rectangular, always on a square canvas or sheet of paper, and it usually stops or blurs just short of the edge, such that, in the eye, it jiggles loose and hovers. The works' perfection registers poetically; by an easy Platonic leap from their candid physical imper- fections. Inevitable vagaries of the art- ist's hand-lines of subtly varying thick- ness, bumping over the tooth of the can- vas-take on a certain raciness, as the only signs of actual nature that this art condones. The grid allowed Martin to com- mand, without fuss, the all-over, all-at- once formal democracy that Pollock, with his drips, had conjured in spasms of inspiration. And it enabled something like the brooding presence of Rothko's color-forms, but in an airy key. From Newman, Martin patently learned how a straight line that is laid under or over, or scored into, a ground 0f paint may take on qualities of being a discrete shape while registering direction and ve- locity across the surface. That is, you don't read Newman's or Martin's line as a graphic contour but as an actor in the pictorial field. It anticipates all the eye's ways of seeing. Edge and shape, figure and ground, and matter and atmosphere are reversible, bringing about, for me, a sense of oscillation in the optic nerve. It's not a perceptual flicker, as in Op art, but a conceptual traffic jam: sheer undecid- abilio/ My analytical facilities, after try- ing to conclude that what I'm looking at is one thing or another, give up, and my mind collapses into a momentary en- gulfing state that is either "spiritual" or nameless. What is the value, for life, of spiri- tuality as a secular discipline? Martin's art sustains that question, an American preoccupation since the New England transcendentalists, which became newly acute, in art, with Rothko, Newman, and Reinhardt. When unrelated to a partic- ular belief: might transcendence be no more than a neurological burp, soothing the mind as the alimentary kind does the stomach? I thought about this at lovely, light-drenched Dia:Beacon, a magnificent place that devotes a terrific amount of real estate and remarkable architectural skill to implementing little hits of pure aesthetic emotion. An anti- church, it offers, in place of religion, beneficent addiction. (The hits wear off quicklr You want more.) This may be the upward limit of what liberal culture can provide for the common soul. Per- haps it's enough. Certainly, Dia:Beacon stirs grateful awe. Look at what we hu- mans can do! Some of Martin's new works at Pace Wildenstein harken back to her ex- perimental formats of the fifties: sym- metrical arrays of triangles or squares and lines that read as horizons. In one case, a regular trapezoid, black in a brushy gray ground, can be read as a re- ceding ramp, or a pit. It is entitled, weirdly, "Homage to Life." (It looks thorougWy deatWy to me.) These retro versions of Martin's questing early work feel willfùlly arbitrary. But her regression seems to have tapped new oomph for her stylings of drawn or scored grids and, in another familiar layout, hori- zontal bands of watery color (grays, blues, and yellows in this show). As al- ways, Martin celebrates, like no otþer painter, the limited virtues of acrylic paint: opacity and fluidio/ One paint- ing, from 2003, is a masterpiece: "The Sea." Scored, alternately continuous and broken horizontal lines cut to white ges- soed canvas through a white-bordered square mass of tar-black paint. The lines' irregular thickness produces a twinkling effect, slightly suggesting a moonless night sky while staying bluntly factual. "The Seà' worked on me faster than any other of Martin's paintings. How could I gainsay anything so effi- ciently profound? I wonder. .